The Importance of Pay Transparency

Monet Davenport:
Welcome to Press The Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue.

When the conversation around pay is obscure and taboo, everyone loses. But when the lines of communication around pay are open and honest, employers and employees benefit. In this episode of Press The Issue, Topher and Allie talk about their experience with pay transparency and how they think changing this narrative benefits us all.

Allie Nimmons:
Hey, Topher, how are you?

Topher DeRosia:
Super awesome today.

Allie Nimmons:
Awesome. Super glad to hear it. Well, I’m really excited to chat with you today on the podcast, and we’re going to talk a little bit about pay transparency, which is a kind of a spicy topic, but one that I’m really eager to dive into with you.

Topher DeRosia:
Excellent. Let’s do it.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. Awesome.

Topher DeRosia:
So I have some questions for you.

Allie Nimmons:
Cool. Awesome.

Topher DeRosia:
I remember the first time I learned that you’re not supposed to talk about what you make. I was at a job where when we got a raise, it happened about April, but they back-filled it to the beginning of the year. But they didn’t tell me I got a raise. I just had a really fat check and I thought, oh, that must be a mistake. So I went to accounting and I said, “Something’s wrong with my check.” And the lady looked at me really funny, and she’s like, “You need to talk to him.”
So I went into a guy’s office and he said, “You don’t ever talk about your pay to anyone but me ever.” I was blown away.

Allie Nimmons:
Wow.

Topher DeRosia:
I’m like, “What? What is this all about?” And that was my first experience knowing that you just don’t talk about pay. But nobody ever told me, even then. He didn’t say why. I just said, “Oh, yes sir.” And went back to my desk and hid. So why is it important? Why do people care? Why don’t people want to talk about this?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, so I don’t really know. That is a crazy story. I’ve never had an experience like that. I don’t really ever remember anyone telling me. It was just kind of always that unspoken thing, it’s like, you know, you don’t talk about, I don’t know, your private life at work. Or there’s certain things that are private. And I think maybe a lot of it too was just watching my mom. And she and I never talked about money as I got older. To this day, I don’t know how much money my mom earns or has earned in any job that she’s had. She never talked about it with me. She never talked about it around me. It just was this sort of taboo thing.

And I think people care, I mean, I say I don’t know because I don’t actually know, but I have some suspicions as to why people care so much about it not being talked about. If you want to go the tin foil hat route, I do think that it’s a method for men to, or I should say, I think it was in the past when women started to enter the workforce, a method for men to control that narrative. If you had a man that ran a company that employed women and men during a time where women were seen as less or even more less than they are seen now in society, paying the women less and encouraging them not to speak about it meant that you could get away with paying them less.

Topher DeRosia:
Sure.

Allie Nimmons:
I mean, I genuinely believe that that’s true. I feel like there’s some people who might think that’s a little conspiratorial, but we live in America. I think that there’s an element of judgment that we want to avoid in society. We want to avoid making anyone feeling uncomfortable.

Topher DeRosia:
Sure.

Allie Nimmons:
So if we each make a different amount, but we do the same job and we talk about how much we make, there might be an issue of judgment of, “Oh, well why do they make more than me? I’ve been here longer,” you know?

Topher DeRosia:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
And there are so many different… We don’t have a universal system of pay. Every company gets to decide how much they pay their employees and why. I mean, we have minimum wage to keep things above that amount, but every owner of any company can say, “I decide that I give raises based off performance.” Or, “I decide I give raises based off of how long you’ve been here.”

Topher DeRosia:
Sure.

Allie Nimmons:
And so in order to eliminate that conversation of, “Well, why does that person make more than me?” And then having to go into that and potentially make people feel uncomfortable, I think it’s just comfortable for people to just keep it to themselves. But in all honesty, I just think it’s one of those things that it’s the way it’s always been. And so we don’t see a need to change it unless there’s a problem associated with it, which we get into the problems associated with it as well.

But I think it’s just one of those taboo “normal things” that people are comfortable not talking about, especially with people who know that they make a lot more than other people. They’re comfortable not talking about it because they don’t need to talk about it.

Topher DeRosia:
Right. Yeah. And in addition, I think it’s also partly because employers want to pay as little as possible across the board. I had a second experience similar to the first one where a friend and I worked together. He was in a completely different department at a university. And I told him what I made and it was substantially more than him. And we did very similar work, but for different departments. And we didn’t talk about it after that. But a couple weeks later, his boss took me into a room and read me the Riot Act.

And by this time, I was a much more mature employee and not nearly as hurt, like intimidated. I wasn’t as intimidated. But it was interesting to me that this was with another man. And I think it’s really because the company, whatever company, wants to pay as little as possible. And if I can pay you less than the other person, well then I’m saving money. And it’s a philosophy of working and employment. If your goal is to save as much money as possible and to put as much cash in the coffers, then that’s what you’re going to do.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. It prevents that element of not necessarily to say competition, but for you to say, “Okay, well this person makes this amount, I’m making a lot less. For it to be fair, you need to pay me more, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s just true.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
And so by limiting the conversation around pay, the employer can get away with, yeah, saving having to pay you that additional amount. That makes total sense.

Topher DeRosia:
So I have two questions here. And one I think I might want to skip a little bit or even just answer myself. What problems happen when transparency’s not there? And the biggest problem I’ve seen is with my friend, he went and asked for a raise, and it wasn’t an ongoing consistent problem. It’s not like there was a buzz of unhappiness in the office. It was a sudden spike of unhappiness where he said, “Hey, I want this money.” And it got all awkward.
But I think we could get a lot more productive out of this talk if we talked about the benefits that come from transparency. So what do you see as the benefits of pay transparency?

Allie Nimmons:
People get more money, right? That’s the super simplified version, which I think that branches out into all these other things. So I’m not an economist, I don’t even know how to say it, I’m so much, I’m not an economist. I don’t fully understand and I never will claim to fully understand the concept of if people get paid more, then that money goes back into the economy and it stimulates this and that. I think there’s truth to that. I’d love for other people listening to let us know exactly how people getting paid more does stimulate a country’s economy. Because that’s super interesting to me.
But in the long and short of it’s like, okay, if… I’m going to speak for personal experience. If I get paid more for the work that I do, which over the course of my career, every job I’ve gone to, I get paid a little bit more. That’s hopefully how it works, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Mm-hmm.

Allie Nimmons:
And by getting paid the proper amount, I can afford to live my life in a way that’s healthy. I can get things like healthcare or I can eat better because in this country, healthy food is more expensive food. I can afford to invest that money. So I can choose to invest in the stock market. I can choose to invest in property. I can build generational wealth with that money. I can put that money in an account for my children, all of these sorts of things. And I think that we don’t always think about, given the fact that pay disparities in these countries disfavor women and people of color, that then just means that their lives are more impoverished than people who don’t fall into those categories.
And that has-

Topher DeRosia:
It perpetuates problems.

Allie Nimmons:
… perpetuates all of those problems. It has infinite amounts of effects, negative effects. And so by paying people the same amount, we’re leveling that playing field and saying, “Allie gets paid the same as Topher. And so Allie and Topher have the same now privileges when it comes to their economic, financial decision making capabilities.
And I think that when you really start to understand the history of socioeconomic decisions and then effects within this country, a lot of it comes down to pay. And it’s a large reason why in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s women couldn’t decide to leave a marriage if it was an abusive one, because either they didn’t make any money, or they didn’t make the same amount of money as their husband would have. And the husband could leave, The husband could support another family if he wanted to because he made so much money. But the woman in this situation either didn’t make any money, didn’t make enough money to be able to have agency over her own life.

So pay transparency really comes down to the more transparent our conversations around pay are, the more likely it is that people are paid equally and equitably. And the more likely it is that any given individual can have financial agency over their life. And that just affects everyone in a positive… Who can sit here and say, “Well, I don’t want the population of my country to be healthy and not live in domestic abuse situations.” Who wants to say that? Nobody. If people making more money means they can afford to send their kids to better schools, which means we have a more educated populous, which who doesn’t want that, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Yep.

Allie Nimmons:
There are so many benefits, and I think in some ways, it’s a short term thing. In some ways it’s a long term thing. Of course, not everybody’s going to use that money, if you want to say properly. Maybe you have people… The argument is always like, well, some people might gamble the money away or some people might waste it and buy TVs and stuff. It’s their money to do with what they want.

Topher DeRosia:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
But if everybody is paid in a more equitable way, that means a higher percentage of people can afford to live in a way that is healthy and safe.

Monet Davenport:
Thank you for listening up to this point. Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com.

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Topher DeRosia:
I also believe that it’s really good for business. I’ve, most of the time, always gotten cost of living races, a few dollars a year or more, but I have never ever been given a raise by any company. So in order to make more money, I’ve had to change jobs. And a lot of it was because I didn’t know what I could be making. Could I be making more somewhere else? And so my inclination is to look around, see what’s going on.

Whereas when there’s pay transparency, I can look at my neighbors and say, “Well, I see what they’re making and I’m doing just fine. I don’t need to look around. Either I wouldn’t do significantly better unless I changed my role or something.” And so I think it helps companies retain employees because they know they’re making a fair wage here. They don’t need to go hunting to get something.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s a huge benefit. You’re totally right. I mean even just, and I’ll be transparent about this, since we have a theme of transparency going where we both work right now for Howard Development & Consulting/MasterWP. I don’t know about you, but when I started, Rob, who hired me, basically showed me what everyone made based off of their role. So it wasn’t down to names, it was down to people in this role make this much. You are going to go into this. Because my role was created for me. He said, “You are going to go into this kind of bucket of this. These people in these roles get paid this much. In one year if you’re still here, if you’d still like to be here, this is what your raise would look like in a year. This is what you will get.”

And that’s not the only reason I like working here. I like working here for a lot of reasons, but that is a huge incentive to… Because I’ve been like you. My whole professional life, I’ve either worked for myself or when I’ve worked in places, I’ve not really worked anywhere for longer than a year. Because it’s sort of like, “Okay, well I want to see what else is out there and there’s not a lot keeping me here.”

Topher DeRosia:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
And just the incentive to say, “Here’s how much more you can be making at this.” This is essentially a promise to you barring circumstances, is a huge incentive to at least try to stick it out. If something were to go wrong here, if I were to decide, “Ah, maybe I want to look somewhere else,” I have that in Rob’s favor, essentially. I have that in the pro column of why should I stay here? So you’re totally right. It definitely can help with retention. And isn’t there some kind of statistic about it’s more expensive to hire new people than it is to retain existing people, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Oh, yes. Yeah. Onboarding is very expensive.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. So why would you not be transparent if it helps people feel confident about sticking with you? That makes so much sense to me.

Topher DeRosia:
Because you can get away with paying some people less.

Allie Nimmons:
So skeezy. And I’m curious as well, if there’s anyone listening. So we’re speaking from our experience as to lifelong United States of America residents. I’d be really curious to see if pay transparency is different in other countries. Because I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it’s different in Europe or South America or any of the African countries. I wonder if there are other countries that are doing the pay transparency thing really well and how that affects their turnover rates and their economies and things like that. I just don’t know.

Topher DeRosia:
I have never known another company to do pay transparency. I mean, I’ve heard about it, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a company do it. And I think that’s interesting.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, I like it. There’s been no downsides as far as I’m concerned.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Because it takes… And especially one of the things that is challenging about walking through life as a underrepresented person, is consistently having the thought or the suspicion or the worry that something is happening to you or not happening to you because of your gender, your race, your disability, your sexual orientation. And so I don’t ever have to wonder, well, am I getting paid this much because of an unconscious bias, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Right.

Allie Nimmons:
Is somebody else on the team making less than me because of an unconscious bias? And that’s something that I can–

Topher DeRosia:
That’s something’s that’s bothered me.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. And so knowing exactly not only what you make, but what other people make in a way that also kind of like… I like the way that Rob does it because it’s like, “It’s these people in these roles start at this much.” It’s not, “Well, this person makes this much and this person makes that much,” which then starts to feel very personal. But knowing all of that allows me to feel very equal to everyone else and not have to worry about how my race or gender plays in or how other people’s race or gender plays into those decisions.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah. Another thing that I’m not quite sure how this is connected, but I’m pretty sure it is somehow. I really like how Rob lets us know on a monthly basis how the company is doing. I have been at companies where things have looked really solid and then suddenly, oh, we just laid off five people. Why? Are we running out of money? Am I next? That kind of thing.
And it’s related to money being secret, you know what I mean?

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Topher DeRosia:
I don’t know how the company’s doing and I don’t know if I’m going to get fired. But we do. And I think it’s tangentially related to the pay transparency. Because you could do the company transparency without revealing pay, but I think it’s just the culture of being able to talk about money and be fair.

Allie Nimmons:
I think it’s all related because, you’re right, it’s a culture of not only just pay, but money in general. How much money does somebody have? How much money is somebody spending? All of that kind of stuff. And yeah, I’ve worked in a couple companies at this point that will share information about how much the company is making. But I’ve never worked somewhere where both are shared. So the companies I’ve worked at before that will share information about sales and so on, we don’t also get to see how much people are making.

So the company can have made a million dollars in that quarter and the CEO gets-

Topher DeRosia:
But not me!

Allie Nimmons:
… Yeah, the CEO is maybe taking home a quarter of that. And so you’re like, “Well wait a minute.” But if we wanted to here at Howard Development & Consulting, we could look at those numbers, look at how much everyone’s getting paid and figure out where all that money’s going if we want. I don’t think anybody’s spending their time doing that, but it feels good to have access to that information.

And it allows us to trust Rob. I trust Rob more because he’s so forth with that information. Because you’re right, the more that’s being hidden in terms of money, the more fear and suspicion and confusion that will pervade.

Topher DeRosia:
FUD. Fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. Wow. So yeah, I’m not sure. I would be really curious as well to hear about are there other WordPress companies that practice pay transparency and how do they do that? We talk sometimes about companies posting job listings of like, “Oh hey, we’re hiring a senior developer.” Posting how much that pay is on the page where somebody might go apply. That’s another form of pay transparency.And so somebody who’s looking around can feel like there’s a competitive element to that of, “Okay, I want to find the job that is going to pay me the best, pay me the most fairly.”

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah. And not waste my time.

Allie Nimmons:
And not waste my time. Because, yeah, sometimes you have to go through a whole interview process just to find out that they’re not paying what you need or what you deserve.

Topher DeRosia:
Exactly. Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Such a waste of time. And what happens with that a lot of times is underrepresented people who don’t have that time or that luxury to spend all that time-

Topher DeRosia:
Are losing it.

Allie Nimmons:
… are just going to look at that page and look away, right? Close it out and say, “Okay, I’m going to find something that’s more direct.” And so I always advocate for putting transparent pay information right up front in the hiring process. And that is a way to diversify your pool of people.

Topher DeRosia:
I think the State of Colorado is the only state that requires that. And so somebody did a Twitter feed, a Twitter thread about companies that will not list jobs in Colorado because they don’t want to say how much they pay.

Allie Nimmons:
Wow.

Topher DeRosia:
And it’s a long list. And there are some companies that we both know and love that are on that list.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s wild. That is so wild.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
And I wonder if it’s going to be something that dies out. Because I do feel like it is almost a generational thing. Going back to what I said before about how people thought about it in the middle of the 20th century, I associate this hush, hushness about money very much with that period of time.

Topher DeRosia:
Oh yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
Where you’re kind of focused on keeping up appearances almost. And so it’s like if you’re not making a lot of money, you don’t want people to know, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Yip.

Allie Nimmons:
And so I kind of wonder as we move away from that period of time, if this kind of next generation of young people coming into tech, I mean a lot of them, if you’ve ever been on tech TikTok, there’s a lot of younger people who are like, “I do not play around with this kind of stuff. I need to know. You need to tell me or I’m going somewhere else.” And I wonder if 20 years from now, if this whole episode is just going to be totally a moot point because things will have changed. I wonder.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah. A bunch of years ago I was in college. I went to a friend’s house for the weekend with her and her dad was at work. And they sat me down at the dining room table and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. And her mom said to me, “Do you know how much money your parents make?” I was like, “This is a weird question.” I said, “Not at the moment, but I have.” I mean, whenever my dad got a new job, I was like, “Hey, cool. How much you making now?” And he would tell me.

And as it turned out in their family, the father did not tell anyone in the family how much he made. And they didn’t do anything with money. He paid all the bills, they had enough money to do what they needed to do, and he made sure that happened.

And that was a stretch for me. I imagine that happening in the ’40s where the man just takes care of it. I never expected to hear it in the ’90s. And right then in that conversation I said, “Well, let’s find out.” So I called my dad, I said, “Hey, how much you making right now?” He’s like, “Why do you want to know?” And I told him. And he’s like, “Oh.” And he told me how much he was making. And they were floored that he would just volunteer that information to his son. And I think it is very much a generational cultural thing that will have to go away.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. Well I think we should leave it off there. I mean, you and I could sit and talk about anything for a super long time including this. But yeah, I think we should top it off there. Thanks so much for sitting down and talking with me about this. I hope that other people listening have found it helpful.

Topher DeRosia:
Oh yeah. Yeah. This was really fun. We should do it more.

Allie Nimmons:
All righty. Cool. Thanks for listening.

Monet Davenport:
Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of MasterWP. Produced by Allie Nimmons. Hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit MasterWP.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.